If St. Patrick was, as some of his earliest biographers aver, a Strathclyde Briton, born about A.D. 387 at Nempthur (Nemphlar, on the Clyde?) and his father Calphurnius was, as St. Patrick himself states in his Confession, a deacon, and his grandfather Potitus a priest, then he belonged to a family two generations of which were already office-bearers in Scotland in the Christian Church;--but were there many, or any such families in Scotland before St. Ninian built his stone church at Whithern about A.D. 397, or St. Palladius, the missionary of Pope Celestine, died about A.D. 431, in the Mearns? And was it a mere rhetorical flourish, or was there some foundation for the strong and distinct averment of the Latin father Tertullian, that, when he wrote, about the time of the invasion of Scotland by Severus (_circa_ A.D. 210), there were places in Britain beyond the limits of the Roman sway already subject to Christ? When Dion Cassius describes this invasion of Scotland by Severus, and the Roman Emperor's loss of 50,000 men in the campaign, does he not indulge in "travellers' tales," when he further avers that our Caledonian ancestors were such votaries of hydropathy that they could stand in their marshes immersed up to the neck in water for live-long days, and had a kind of prepared homoeopathic food, the eating of a piece of which, the size of a bean, entirely prevented all hunger and thirst? Caesar tells us that dying the skin blue with woad was a practice common among our British ancestors some 1900 years ago;--are Claudian and Herodian equally correct in describing the very name of Picts as being derived from a system of painting or tattooing the skin, that was in their time as fashionable among some of our Scottish forefathers, as it is in our time in New Zealand, and among the Polynesians? According to Caesar, the Britons wore a moustache on the upper lip, but shaved the rest of the beard; and the sole stone--fortunately a fragment of ancient sculpture--which has been saved from the ruins of the old capital of the Picts at Forteviot, shows a similar practice among them. But what did they shave with? Were their razors of bronze, or iron, or steel? And where, and by whom, were they manufactured? Was the state of civilisation and of the arts among the Caledonians, when Agricola invaded them, about A.D. 80 or 81, as backward as some authorities have imagined, seeing that they were already so skilled in, for example, the metallurgic arts, as to be able to construct, for the purposes of war,--chariots, and consequently chariot-wheels, long swords, darts, targets, etc.?